Hi Jack7957,
You’ve done a great job in preparation for reloading your WordPress installation. It should not be necessary to remove the database. You should be able to just remove the WordPress site files, load your new ones and configure that installation to connect with your existing database.
Thought you might want to know this information as well. The most likely cause for 500 errors with WordPress is incorrect syntax in the .htaccess file. This is usually fairly simple to fix with your Permalinks settings in the dashboard. This information from the WordPress Codex should be helpful:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks
Hope this helps!
Do not delete the database if you want to keep your posts.
If you are looking to keep your posts, then you’re probably not going to want to wipe your site – and especially not your database. You have a few options that could work for you:
a) Talk to your host to try to resolve the 500 error. It could be something as simple as a permissions issue. THEN upgrade.
b) delete all the old files, install the new fileset and configure it to talk to the current database. It *should* upgrade the old database and start working with your old content in place.
c) Something in-between: delete all your plugins in wp-content/plugins, and all but the default theme in wp-content/themes. This should get you a relatively clean system to work with, assuming the core files haven’t been changed or hacked.
If you want to completely clean the content, once you are up and running, you can “export” your site and posts, setup a brand new install , then re “import” them.
If you need specific instructions on any of the above, please ask.
Thanks for the help both of you, I’m glad I asked, otherwise I would have deleted/recreated my database. I’m back up and running now with a clean install.
I wasn’t too worried about finding out the reason for the 500 errors, since I planned on wiping/reloading. In addition to my site, I had remnants of other sites in my webspace that I had created/deleted. Plus from doing some searches I saw several fixes for the 500 errors, tried a few, nothing was working, so that’s why I decided a simple wipe/reload was the way to go.
